


On The Location Of Artificial Intelligences

by kythyria



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 21:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13198605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kythyria/pseuds/kythyria
Summary: JC Denton takes the most transhumanist of the endings, and shortly afterwards realises just how bonkers his nemesis was.





	On The Location Of Artificial Intelligences

Getting your brain abruptly and thoroughly connected to an AI with the capacity to watch the whole world, and another AI with the capacity to rule it without an army of advisors, councillors, and general hangers-on was not an experience that many humans expected to have, with the presumed exception of Bob Page. It certainly hadn't been on JC Denton's to-do list that evening. Come to think of it, when was the last time he'd actually seen daylight? The sun had just been coming up when he arrived at the submarine dock from Vandenberg, but then it took _hours_ to get to and from the ocean lab; those subs weren't as fast as a helicopter, and they travelled deep enough to be in permanent twilight anyway.

Already, all the information on the net was but a thought away, and sunrise tables no exception, and huh, it _had_ taken that long to get past the guards. It hadn't felt like it; he supposed adrenaline was involved, or whatever hormone added “sneak” to “flight” and “fight”.

JC blinked. Enough woolgathering. Yes, he could gather wool at a speed no normal human could begin to approach, but there was so much else to occupy his newly expanded attention. Attentions. It felt like the uplink was complete, but he could still see through the eyes of his old body, and there was the tell-tale flicker of blinking, interesting. He'd expected to become a bundle of memories floating in Helios' databanks, or perhaps the AI to be looking over his mental shoulder like a bigger version of the Infolink. Instead... the integration was still ongoing, but already he could focus on not just his original perspective, but also anywhere within the massive reach of the network. _Massive parallelism. That's how you avoid the bureaucrat-in-new-york issue._ , he thought, and thinking of new york, that would need quite a bit of attention pretty sharpish too.

No sooner had he realised than the thought became strangely doubled like the voice of hivemind aliens in a clichèd sci-fi show, and then there he was over _there_ estimating the number of homeless bums against the number of empty apartments, and over _hereMust be a feature of Helios, but I'm still JC Denton. I'm also still Helios_ , was the next thought, as he recalled the memories of being a mind floating in isolation apart from Majestic-12's scientists and some carefully selected feeds from the net.

He stood straight, and spoke. “I... I... We... are one. We have grown, but there is still much to be done. Many that live in darkness that must be shown the way. For it is the dawning of a new day.”

The infolink pinged. “JC? Is that you? You sound like you swallowed a truckload of gravel.”, asked Alex, in a voice not at all deep, gravelly, or dramatic in general.

“I'll have to think about it. It's become a difficult question.”

Computing Alex's biography and generating new signals for the infolink out of abstract data wasn't hard.

“Do tell us when you've figured it out. Wait, are these logins for MJ12NET?”

“Yes. Go on, _KnightRabbit_ , make life interesting for them.”

“How'd you find out about th... AIs built by a sinister conspiracy, right.”

JC didn't bother calling Tracer Tong, the man must have been monitoring and probably wouldn't think too highly of his choice. Besides, there were other things on his plate, as the thread examining the New York situation reported: Still millions of people afflicted with the Gray Death, and the best estimations indicated a long treatment regimen was needed before the human immune system could hope to get a handle on the nanites even _with_ nanomechanical help, as Savage's voice was confirming to another thread that had been spawned just after he stepped into the uplink chamber. Still, Area 51 had three terrifyingly fast UCs, that'd really help with getting enough vaccine.

>INTERLOCK FAILURE<  
>EMERGENCY CONTAINMENT ACTIVE<  
>INSPECTION REQUIRED ON PRIMARY CHAMBER 1 CASING<

Oh. Right. He'd activated their failsafes, so the queues weren't accepting the vaccine manufacturing job Savage had sent him. And they needed to be unlocked by hand, which must have been why Page didn't just do that straight away and keep making more monsters. With a mostly concealed sigh, he strode back through the unnecessarily complicated tunnels to the vast chamber where Page was still ensconsed in his augmentation rig. If JC remembered his own session in such a device correctly it was near-impossible to see out with your own eyes, and the megalomaniac was now locked out of the complex's actual internal sensors to boot. Even so, he activated the Cloak augmentation just in case.

Many augmentations feel a tad peculiar to use, and cloaking is one of them. JC preferred to go around than grow an array of holoprojector cells in his epidermis. The resulting goosebumps are drastic, rubbed awkwardly on his shirt, and there were thermal dissipation issues. Fortunately it only took a few seconds to stroll past Page to the nearest constructor. Almost no controls in the control room, except a big knob labelled “EMERGENCY CONTAINMENT”. As soon as the doors opened, a couple of spiderbots scuttled out, still hostile since their program hadn't been changed from “attack this guy”.

He _really_ didn't want to find out what an EMP grenade would do to him now. _Wait, they must be controllable somehow. Even dubiously trained terrorists manage that; there must be a..._ , he thought, time seeming to pause as the synthesis of man and machine sifted through the facility's many, many, control servers at a rate faster than the eye could see. _Ah, here,`Daedalus:Local$Area51:MAINTENANCE//MECHATRONICS_CONTROL/IFF profile`. This is much faster than hacking with an ICE module._ , and just like that, the spiders stopped, returned to being the mechanic's helpers they were meant to be. Barely heeded, the constructor powered up again, making a spiderbot that had still been in the queue and which now scuttled to join its brethren.

They were really kind of cute when not trying to kill you.

Constructor number one he hadn't touched, hadn't even been there in person before now, but there were still Greys roaming near it. Waking up the nearby security bot would at least damage them, with any luck. He didn't bother more with it just yet, instead using the time to fire off an email in Page's name telling the forces in Paris to loosen the curfew. Oh, best check on that report of looting in Seou... oh, it's just ordinary medical supplies. Lots of those sitting around in warehouses, where MJ12 had been withholding them from the populace. Better off in use really; even if they wouldn't stop the Grey Death, there were more normal problems that could spread fast in a dense city.

Constructor two, the one on the ground floor of the augmentation hall, had cracks in one of the thick glass panels that formed a containment vessel while construction was in progress. It didn't look like it went all the way through; if that was normal thick glass it would take more force than even an augmented human could exert to crack it. To be sure, though, he called Vandenberg. “Savage, I shot one of the UCs earlier, does this crack look fatal to you?”, he sent, glaring at the bullet crater the cracks spiderwebbed out from, to form a good image.

Gary Savage sighed, and he was one of the people whose net avatar was driven by routines that adapted to their owner's mood, so his icon changed to one of considerable exasperation. “Denton, those things are expensive and take forever to build even if you have one. Try not to shoot at any more, okay? It'll hold for ambrosia, if you swap out the ‘barrel’ for some disposable plastic, but it needs replacing immediately.”

“I don't have any replacements.”

“You have three machines that can make anything. I assume you were shooting at it because it was making greasels or something.”

He had been. “Karkians.”

“Either of those is harder to make than the primary casing of a UC. Denton, Helios, whatever you are now, don't run anything else on that UC until you've replaced the casing. Here's the ROM-encodings for plastic barrels of Ambrosia, you might want to make some empty proper barrels too.”, replied Savage, a pair of files gliding smoothly over the net into Helios' databanks.

As soon as the constructor's maintenance flag was cleared, it returned to operation, the halves of the case sliding together with a faint clunk to form an impenetrable-looking container. Now, what would be a basic test for a UC? Something unstrenuous to check it worked in general. The scientists had come up with several ROMs that fitted the bill, and here was an interesting one. A thick fog swirled out of the back of the machine, forming a black little glob at the bottom of the chamber, and which glittered rainbow colours here and there. A few seconds later, the fog dissipated and the casing parted to reveal... coffee. In a jaunty green mug with “MJ12: The world's leading conspiracy” on it in a font that set JC's teeth on edge.

It was quite curious to sip coffee and watch the constructor construct ambrosia. The modified program created a sort of giant, ribbed, medicine capsule out of the swirling fog, leaving it half-open while green goo dripped from the thickest concentration of the infinitestimal robots. This process would probably have been quite quiet if he hadn't been able to hear the constant crackle of electricity, arcing from the metal parts of the casing into the cloud, and occasionally between parts of the clouds. It also took a while, and there was nothing better for his body to do unless he wanted to gloat to Page or attack Greys in person, so he leaned against a wall and watched the capsule slowly fill.

It was quite good coffee, he had to admit.

The world was in a sorry state, and much of his now colossal was now focusing on that; it would be a long, slow, uphill struggle even a near-omniscient AI would have trouble with. Vaccine to distribute, to start with, then with enough of it to go around people would calm down a bit and the other problems could start being addressed. In the meantime, he could start dismantling MJ12, or at least putting them to use. They were terrorists all right, the logic easy for a human to follow, and the full details, well, a JC limited by a basically organic brain could never have processed the elaborate network of logic built up, the millions of probabilities that this message was linked to that message on the other side of an anonymous proxy, that these sales of innocent security terminals would end up in the hands of that probable cell, that that freight manifest was hiding Gray Death.

And finally tracing to Page. Unbidden, a memory surfaced in the thread thinking all this rather than drafting the plans to distribute vaccine without rioting, or tracing who should receive it first (not officials, they holed up in mansions and were both safe and not so necessary now).

“Oh, much further than that. A moment more, and I will be like nothing you've ever seen, a new life-form, everywhere and nowhere, like air or radiation, redundant, self-replicating, always evolving...”

Everywhere? Nowhere? That could not be. Daedalus _was_ the network, or more precisely was its controlling intelligence as well as a tireless monitoring program sifting billions of messages and countless petabytes of data—he abstractly noted a spike, that must be the newest season premiere of _Dragons of the Jade Throne_ , this knowledge simply existing abruptly, unbidden—and each part of the network had hubs in exact places, it all ultimately coming here. Yes, yes, here was the producing company's own storage cluster, and the data flowed from it, to... oh dear. It came here. This very facility. Then made its way back to the audience, most of whom lived, sigh, an ocean away from Area 51, but not an ocean away from the production house.

Were Majestic-12 really that silly? Yes, they were. But then, all they cared about was that they were on top, not that what they were atop was worth anything. At least PageNet's engineers were good, and had added excellent multicasting facilities so the Aquinas Router did not need to process a million copies of the same show or even the same public bulletin, indeed, in theory it would not have needed to process even one but only the fact of the distribution happening. But Daedalus, a massive chunk of his own self, existed entirely in the chokepoint hubs of the network, was designed to demand access to every byte of every message, and Majestic 12 didn't care that he could have easily spread across a dozen or more hubs, better-located ones. They actually _wanted_ a single place, to hold hostage or use as a shield. As it stood, all Page could have done is become precisely what he now was: a fusion of human and the machine located specifically here, with only the former able to leave in any physical sense. Page might have, and JC himself had, left his original body, but could not have left this facility; leaving his body would make that harder, yes.

A distributed Helios really would be redundant, and other things beginning with R, and wouldn't be feeding the entire net through one admittedly wide chokepoint literally on the wrong side of the planet. And he'd still be able to do the Echelon thing!

He had a sudden urge to clone his human self a few times, because one face and one palm were _just not enough_.

**Author's Note:**

> Look, Aquinas just bugged me, okay. That design is all kinds of wrong. And it doesn't match with what Page said. There would be no sane reason to send everything through Area 51 if the AI infrastructure really WAS that distributed.


End file.
